“I don’t know. It’s not—it wasn’t—impossible.” Duffy picked up the bottle and refilled his glass.
“How old are you, Brian? You ought to know by now that something always breaks up love affairs unless both parties are willing to compromise themselves. And that compromising is harder to do the older and less flexible and more independent you are. It just isn’t in you, Brian. You could no more get married now than you could become a priest, or a sculptor, or a greengrocer.”
Duffy opened his mouth to voice angry denials, then one corner turned up and he closed it. “Damn you,” he said wryly. “Then why do I want to, half the time?”
Aurelianus shrugged. “It’s the nature of the species. There’s a part of a man’s mind that can only relax and go to sleep when he’s with a woman, and that part gets tired of always being tensely awake. It gives orders in so loud a voice that it often drowns out the other components. But when the loud one is asleep at last, the others regain control and chart a new course.” He grinned. “No equilibrium is possible. If you don’t want to put up with the constant seesawing, you must either starve the logical components or bind, gag and lock away in a cellar that one insistent one.”
Duffy grimaced and drank some more brandy. “I’m used to the rocking, and I was never one to get motion-sick,” he said. “I’ll stay on the seesaw.”
Aurelianus bowed. “You have that option, sir.”
The Irishman smiled at the sorcerer with something akin to affection. “Do I gather you’ve been through one or two of these affairs yourself?”
“Oh, aye.” The old man leaned back against a bureau, reached up over his head and found one of his dried snakes. He rolled it unlit between his fingers, staring at it thoughtfully. “Not in the last three centuries, thank the heavens, but in my comparative youth—yes, a number of entanglements, artfully baited, but each one eventually ending with its own version of the one standard ending.”
Duffy drained his glass again and set it on the table. “This is a side of you I never glimpsed,” he said. “Tell me about these girls—tell me about the last one, three centuries ago, for God’s sake.”
The wizard’s glass was empty, too, and for a moment he goggled at the snake in his left hand and the glass in his right. Then, coming to a decision, he held the glass out for Duffy to refill. “She was a Sussex witch named Becky Banham,” he said as the liquor splashed messily into his glass. “She was a small-time country witch, but definitely the real thing—not one of these horoscoping crystal-gazers.”
“And this... liaison broke up because you were too old to compromise and didn’t care to starve your logical—”
“Well, no. Not this one.”
“Oh? It was her decision, then?”
“No. She—” He glared defensively at the Irishman. “She was burned at the stake.”
“Oh! Sorry to hear it.” Duffy didn’t know what more to say about a woman who, whatever else might be said of her, had still been dead longer than his great-great-grandfather.
Aurelianus nodded. “Sorry, you say? So was I, so was I. When I heard of it, a week or two later, I... visited that village.” He sipped his brandy thoughtfully. “You can still see a chimney or two of the place these days, sticking up from the grassed-over mounds.”
Getting up abruptly, the old man lurched over to a chest in the corner. “Somewhere in here,” he said, lifting back the heavy lid and flinging small objects carelessly to the side, “is a book of her country-spells she gave me. Ah? Aha!” He straightened up, holding a battered, leather-bound little book. He flipped open the front cover and read something on the flyleaf, then slammed it shut and stared at the ceiling, blinking rapidly.
Duffy found himself regretting his momentary flash of sympathy. For God’s sake, man, he thought, show a little restraint, a little control. To steer the sorcerer onto less maudlin ground, he asked, “And how does the siege look to you lately? Any sorcerous hints or glimpses of the outcome?”
Aurelianus put the book down on a cluttered table and resumed his seat, a little self-consciously. “No, nothing. Sorcerously I’m blind and deaf, as I’m sure I explained to you. When I want to know how Vienna stands I ask someone like yourself, who has been out there and seen it happening.” He put the snake in his mouth at last, and stared hard, cross-eyed, at the thing’s head. After perhaps a minute a red glow showed on the end, and then with a brief gout of flame the thing was lit, and he was cheerfully puffing smoke.
Duffy cocked an eyebrow. “How much of that sort of thing can you still do?”
“Oh, I can do small things only, tricks, like making beetles stand up and jig or making girls’ skirts blow up over their heads. You know the sort of thing? But I can do nothing that is directly aggressive to the Turks, not even send them scalp-itch or foot-stink. Of course we’re protected to the same degree from Ibrahim... it’s simply a deadlock of all the powerful areas of magic, which I think I predicted to you five months ago.”
Duffy was refilling his glass again. “Yes. You wanted to get your rain-magic done while you still had no restrictions on your power—and it may well have worked.”
The old wizard was mildly annoyed. “May have worked? It did work, you clod. Have you seen any big cannons among the Turk formations, like the ones they overthrew Rhodes with? No, you haven’t. My heavy rains forced Suleiman to leave them behind.”
“The rain was damned fortunate, certainly,” Duffy agreed. “But can you be sure it was summoned rain, and not a natural phenomenon that was going to happen anyway?”
“You were there. You know. You just want to argue with me.”
“Very well, I admit it worked that time in May. But what’s the use of having a wizard on our side if he can’t do any wizardry?”
Aurelianus let a long stream of smoke out in a sigh. “Picture yourself in a corps-à-corps with a swordsman who is your equal in skill; your dagger is blocking his dagger, and your sword his sword. Now your dagger isn’t free to stab with—but would you say it’s useless?”
“No... but I wouldn’t just stand there straining. I’d knee the bastard and spit in his eyes. Listen, when you were describing this deadlock in advance, you said it would be virtually unbreakable.”
Aurelianus frowned. “Yes. It is.”
“Virtually doesn’t mean the same thing as absolutely.”
“Hell, man, the sun is virtually certain to rise tomorrow morning, the sea is—”
“It could be broken, though? It’d be tremendously difficult or unlikely, but it could?”
“Could a man amputate, butcher and cook his own legs to avoid starvation? Yes.”
“How? Not this starving man, I mean—”
“I know. Very well, there are two courses I could take that would free all the potency of military magic. One is horribly uncertain, and the other is horribly certain. Which one would you like to hear about?”
“Both. What’s the uncertain one?”
“Well, the present balance is between Ibrahim and me; it would tilt in our favor if the Fisher King himself were actually to ride out and join his will with mine in a battle. Do you understand? He’d have to be there physically and take part in it. That’s unthinkably dangerous, like recklessly advancing your king out from behind the pawn wall in a chess game when your life and the lives of everyone you know are somehow at stake.” He spread his hands. “After all, Vienna isn’t the absolutely final place in which to make a last stand against the East. There are other strength-spots where we could regroup and not be too much worse off than we are now.